Following a lengthy period of internal disagreements, four Presbyterian congregations have attempted to separate themselves from the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of England and Wales (EPCEW) – but EPCEW has refused to recognise their action.
EPCEW was established in the 1990s and has grown to 22 congregations across the UK and Europe. However, two years ago disagreements arose within the Sheffield (SPC) congregation.
It culminated with the Sessions (eldership) of SPC and also those of both Blackburn and Bury St Edmunds removing their congregations from EPCEW by unilaterally entering into ‘Deeds of Separation’. The Lincoln congregation also voted to leave.
The Deeds renounce the jurisdiction of Presbytery (the EPCEW denominational church court) claiming ‘serious constitutional breaches’ and alleged ‘unbiblical actions’.
But EPCEW has refused to recognise the separations under its ‘Form of Government’. Following a presbytery meeting in March, it issued a statement saying the Deeds ‘were without effect, the constitutional process for the separation of congregations not having been followed’.
The recognition, or otherwise, of the Deeds is important because several disputes involving the congregations remain before the church courts – particularly, appeals by 11 Sheffield members following their purported erasure from membership of that congregation.
An earlier version of this story stated that: "The Lincoln congregation, a Sheffield plant, was also taken out of EPCEW by SPC." We have been asked to make it clear that in fact all four congregations which left EPCEW had their own distinct Sessions, and all had their own congregational meetings, in which the members voted unanimously not to continue with EPCEW, and thus there was no sense in which LPC was "taken out of EPCEW by SPC". We are happy to run this clarification from SPC. A photo from the SPC website has also been removed from this article as we now realise it was copyrighted.
